In what is perhaps his most remarkable poem, Catullus describes the ecstatic experience of Attis, a young man seized with the desire to worship Cybele. Like all galloi, Attis castrates himself; this change of anatomical gender is marked in the Latin by an actual change of grammatical gender that is almost impossible to represent in English, though it would have been arresting to its original Roman readers:

Attis, carried over the high seas in a swift ship, as he reached the Phrygian grove with eager desire and approached the goddess's dark places shadowed in woods, there aroused by a mad rage, his mind wandering, he sheared off his genitals with a sharp flint. And then, as s/he perceived he/r limbs were left without manhood, even then spotting the soil of the earth with fresh blood, aroused, s/he...